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My blog banner above speaks to this weeks theme. White fences along a quaint New England byway are beautiful in the autumn of the year. I know, another cheesy, easy post from CrazyasaCoolFox, but I just couldn't resist. Honestly there was no collaboration between Theme Thursday blog moderator and myself! :)

The person I was referring to "Don," in last week's theme, well his last name is Key.Moving on, this weeks theme is stretch.

I'm getting this post in just before the deadline. I struggled with this theme this week. I was walking by a trash receptacle today and look what appeared! I know it's cheesy but I think it was there for me to see. :) That's all I got!

Fear has Mr. Groundhog acting strangely after nearly 7 months of relentless campaigning to oust him from his job in Punxautawney, Pennsylvania.

Yes Mr. Groundhog we see you beginning to crack. The public doesn't like an animal that can't handle pressure. No wonder you screw up your forecasts every February 2nd. You were wrong last year and the year before. Your record clearly shows you have lost your effectivness in the work place.

Ha, what work place? You sit in your cushy little den all nice and warm cuddled up to sleep all winter. Then you come out once a year and give us this bogus weather forecast. How do you work with? The moles and squirrels? Yah I bet they love having your lazy butt in the office.

I bet you have cable in that den. Really Mr Groundhog, tell us what you watch. I think you're a closet fan of "So You Think You Can Dance," aren't you? Yah you wish you could dance. Can you just imagine that body gliding lightly over the dance floor? Noooo…

I have posted videos in the past about a camel and a handicapped dog that climbed the Mount Washington Auto Road. Now you're going to see just how steep and dangerous this road can be.

This is an actual road that normal cars can drive up for a fee. It's 7.6 mile road up a 6288 foot high mountain. The new course speed record was set at 6:20:47 minutes. They were going pretty dang fast. You do the math. lol.

The best part of this video is above tree line. Remember there are NO guard rails. One little mistake and they go flying. The co driver is giving the driver codes as to how fast to go and how sharp to turn the wheel. At one point he makes a mistake but quickly corrects himself. At another point they enter the base of the clouds and continue in the FOG. They exit the cloud bank near the summit.

Watch it in full screen HD if you can, and hold on to something, you're going for a ride!

Oui a la tromperie de l'œil. That's French for deception of the eye. It's in the lower right photo and rather obvious. It was in September of 1997 that myself and a friend were involved in a fund raiser called Boston to New York AIDS ride. Thousands of riders raised over $3,000,000 for Hiv/AIDS research. We are pictured here at the finish line just a few blocks north of the World Trade Center. Two photos were taken of both of us after we rode the entire three day, 300 mile event side by side. We asked a follow rider to shoot a photo of each of us at the finish. He shot Jarid with the World Trade Center in the background. He then turned to me and snapped a photo with the brick building in the background. At the time we of course were unaware of how cherished this photo would become. Since the 9/11 disaster was such an significant event in American history. I wanted to be pictured with the former towers in the background too as an honour. It was to late to go to NYC to have …

For some reason the poem "Purple Cow" came back to me today. I remember my father would say this poem to us kids sometimes to wake us up, sometimes at bedtime. I always laughed so much when I heard it.

So I did a little research on this silly subject. After all this blog is about crazy and cool things. I found this cool "sepiaized" original print from the publication, "The Lark." "Purple Cow" was written in "The Lark," by Gelett Burgess. "The Lark was produced by Burgess himself.

I never saw a purple cow.I never hope to see one.But I will tell you anyhow,I'd rather see one than be one.

Burgess had a great sense of humor evident in the silliness of the poem itself. It became so popular that he was hounded constantly by people asking him if he was the author and …

I would like to ask you all my readers why I'm getting a high amount of hits on certain posts and a lower amount on others.

My most popular post is entitled "Triangle." It's a semi-fictitious story about a boy who takes a short cut through the woods. Part of this post really did happen to me but I won't say which part. "Triangle" has been getting approximately 1000 hits per month since I authored it.

My next most popular post is called, "Painted Pigs." Honestly this post is nothing but a silly photograph I found on the internet of some little piglets covered in florescent paints. I thought the photo was cute so I posted it with a caption. I'm getting about half is many posts here as I am with "Triangle." Even more puzzling is that "Painted Pigs" has suddenly become more popular than "Triangle" and is on a pace to become the number one post on this blog in about one month.

The sun is bouncing off the windows of the building in across the street from the Johnson addition to the Boston Public Library. I caught this shot just at the right time. It's more the opposite of a shadow shot. It's a reflective shot from windows. Sorry for the poor quality. The photo was taken with an older phone camera in winter when the sun is low in the sky. The building in the rear left is the John Hancock Tower.

When I think of heirlooms it's jewelry or a silver tea set, or antique furniture passed down through the generations. Heirlooms in our family are funny ones. We have ducks and a donkey. They are not the ducks and donkey one would think. These are cement ducks and donkey. Yes, cement...

My grandmother had a small "get away" in the woods of Alton, New Hampshire. She spent days and weeks there in the spring, summer, and fall. She especially loved and thrived having family around.

She had beautiful gardens around the property and tended them with the utmost care. She took pride in her plants and spent many hours fertilizing, pruning and weeding.

She had two very special garden ornaments which she cared for just as meticulously. They were the ducks and a donkey you see in these photos.

They were always neatly painted and cleaned every spring and they stayed outside till late fall. They were taken in every winter into the garage for safe keeping. Guess who had to carry them in?…

Don felt a cold shiver. You see, he lost a very dear friend. They had been friends for years. In fact they were together from the very beginning...

They spent many magical days together. They felt the warmth of the new spring sunlight as it rose higher and higher each day in the sky. Don's friend gave him a new clothes that were made by hand every year. There was always had a signature red and white colour through them. He was always proud of the way his clothes looked. His friend had very good taste in clothing and knew the latest in style and fashion.

Image via Wikipedia There were summer days when they frolicked in the watery mist of a sprinkler. It was much need relief from the heat, even though much of his time he spent in the shade of the big trees . His friend would look after him seeing to it that he looked his best.

When fall came they played together in the leaves. They watched the leaves fall from the big trees above. One by one they trickled down. Sometimes they would t…

My friend Kat has tagged me to write a meme. If you don't know what a meme is you can check it out here. Really, don't worry about what a meme is. Basically I have the honour of disclosing seven facts about me then I get to choose seven other writers to disclose seven things about themselves. It's something like a chain letter, but Kat didn't threaten me with death if I didn't do it. So here goes:

I have never stepped foot off the North American Continent. Well if you count swimming in the Atlantic Ocean as stepping off, then I guess I have left the continent briefly.Speaking of oceans, for several summers I was a lifeguard on Plum Island in Newburyport, MA. It's a rough job watching pretty women and getting a nice tan, let me tell you!When I was a child of maybe 5 or 6 I got lost in a department store. I panicked and ran around to find my parents. I finally found them after what seemed like ages. I can still remember that frantic feeling. I guess if I didn'…

This post is chock full of good tidbits. I probably should have written two separate posts but think of it as a bonus double Sepia Saturday post.

The first post card is of a group of "clam shanties or shacks." The City of Newburyport was once famous for the clams harvested from Joppa Flats which are just to the right in the postcard image. The flats are exposed at low tide. Because the flats produced thousands of bushels of clams per season they needed to have "clam shuckers" to process them. The shuckers worked out of these shacks. You can see a few of these crusty old salts in the second postcard.

To shuck a clam the shucker would insert a knife blade into the clam to cut the muscle the clam uses to hold the shell closed. They would then open the shell and scoop out the contents which they then dropped into a pail. They did this over and over and did it with speed and accuracy. I can't imagine how they could do it so fast. I tried to shuck some clams once. I e…